Knuckling down to it
With apologies to those who have not been following my progress since having a full right hip replacement in July, and (now I think of it) probably also to those who have, I return again to my chosen subject rather more swiftly than I might otherwise have done for the simple reason that on Bank Holiday Monday I may have made a small breakthrough.
It wasn’t quite in the Douglas Bader class – whether the story is true, apocryphal, a scene from Reach For The Sky, the 1956 movie featuring Kenneth More as the WW2 legless flying ace, or I even just made it up – who, during his first session designed to help him stand up and take his first steps on his artificial legs, apparently told the physiotherapists to throw away the sticks they were offering because he was never going to use them, but for me it did rank as a mini-epiphany.
See here for a short portrayal of the Bader approach from said film – YOUTUBE
In life, when the bad or complicated times come along, especially in health terms, it is fascinating how individual people’s inner strength of personality (or the opposite) can sometimes affect how they deal with them for either good or ill.
Most of us can probably divide those we know who have fought illness or injury with great fortitude into two camps – those of whom we would have fully expected it and those of whom we wouldn’t.
By the same token, we probably also know people who have quietly done everything by the medical book as advised and thereby make a textbook recovery … and, in contrast, those who have boldly tried to make a point of recovering faster than everyone else, constantly ‘pushing the envelope’ and thrusting away like a bull in a china shop, and as a result run into complications and/or ended up taking comparatively longer to return to full working order.
If you’d asked me – regarding myself as a relatively robust and ‘straight up and at ‘em’ sort of character – I would have personally identified with the group who were strong, worked hard and made my recovery ahead of schedule. It’s ironic or interesting therefore that – when I sensed my progress stalling at the beginning of August – I soon became frustrated and disappointed, if not a bit disheartened.
When I received my ‘more advanced’ (and much tougher) set of four exercises from the physio last week and immediately found one of them – doing three sets of lying on my side and lifting my ‘bad’ leg (kept straight) up into the air 10 times – completely physically impossible for me to achieve, even once, under my own steam, things mentally dipped another notch.
Then I woke up on Monday and from somewhere made a decision.
I was no longer going to accept my current plight – i.e. having to use a walking stick everywhere I went and (without one) only being able to walk like a drunken sailor in a Force 10 gale. I was going to abandon the stick altogether and, no matter how slow my further progress, just make myself walk without one.
Everything has seemingly changed since that moment. Both on Monday and yesterday afternoons, I set out on a rough and ready half-mile circuit of my own devising and simply ‘walked’ around it as best I could, feeling a significant sense of achievement once I’d made it back home. On yesterday’s expedition, instead of taking it carefully and hanging onto the rail on the three occasions I had to climb or descend a set of steps, I refused to do that and made myself complete the exercise without using the rail at all. It was a bit of a struggle, but I made it.
The effect has been very positive. Afterwards, both Monday and yesterday, I attacked my new set of four exercises with renewed gusto. Despite trying my utmost, however, I still cannot do that last one I mentioned earlier – but even that fact hasn’t bother me as much. Partly this could be because, when I met with a pal yesterday and mentioned the issue, he told me that this was all perfectly normal: his wife (who herself had a hip operation last year) had experienced exactly the same problem with the same exercise.
Things are looking up. I could be kidding myself here, but I’ve even gained the impression that – when I get going – my ‘drunken’ limp is less pronounced that it was.